Why we wander in power corridors

“Public administration in Lithuania is still not balanced, there is no clear distribution of functions of ministries, Country Governors, and municipalities, they are not coordinated or duplicate each other,“ states the National Audit Office having performed performance audit of public administration. Auditor General Rasa Budbergytė says that never-ending reform of public administration system is going on in a nonsystematic way and notes that the reform of Counties governance is the reason for most discussions. She also adds that a model for redistribution of functions of Counties drafted by the Government will allow to finish the County reform and improve public administration system. However, prior to dissolving County Governors‘ Administrations, it is necessary to rationally redistribute their functions in order to satisfy needs of residents in the best possible way.

In the Law on County Governance 46 functions are ascribed to the competence of County Governor; still more functions are stipulated in other legislation. Audit analysis shows that many of them are performed by other government bodies and municipalities; some functions are not performed by County Governors, while some of them should not be implemented in Counties at all. These facts are confirmed by examples in the audit report.

County Governors Administrations execute public supervision of construction of all the buildings; however, similar supervision is also executed by the State Territorial Planning and Construction Inspectorate under the Ministry of Environment: it carries out selective inspections on activities of construction participants. In the opinion of public auditors, such distribution of implementation of supervision functions is not rational.

It was detected during the audit that functions for establishing institutions are performed by several governance levels of public administration entities. For example, some high schools operating in Vilnius County are established by the Ministry of Education and Science, some – by Vilnius County Governor, while some of them were established by Vilnius City Municipality Council. In the opinion of the auditors, distribution of establishing functions among several levels arises a risk of duplication of functions, as well as nonsystematic development of network of institutions. It may have a negative effect on economic use of State Budget funds.

The National Audit Office of Lithuania recommends to enhance the role of the Ministry of the Interior when implementing governance reforms. Current functions ascribed to this Ministry do not ensure a thorough and complete coordination of implementation of governance reforms. There is no institution for monitoring and coordination of activities of all the public administration entities, therefore the risk remains that implementation of governance reforms will not be sufficiently effective in the future as well.

Full report is available in Lithuanian:
Distribution of Functions Among Public Administration Entities